"November Quiet" (Text & Image Copyright Wylddane Productions, LLC)
It is November again—one of those hushed, in-between mornings when the world seems to hold still just long enough for memory to surface. As I sip my first coffee of the day—hot, fragrant, necessary—I am drawn into that long-ago night from my college years: a quiet street, a stop sign, and the sound of dry leaves skittering past my car in the wind. Nothing remarkable except for the feeling that rose inside me—an unexpected ache of melancholy I could not name. I wasn’t sad, not really. I was simply awakening to the truth that life carries seasons inside us, long before experience gives us words to understand them.
That memory returns now like a leaf blown back across the years.
The music in the room is Diane Upshaw, her voice drifting like incense through the quiet, singing Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs—pure, aching, beautiful. Outside, the light gathers slowly, as if November prefers not to arrive all at once. I look to the photograph before me: a quiet river in the northwoods, still as glass, reflecting the bare trees like a second forest turned upside-down.
The leaves are gone. The branches have become script against a pale November sky. The river does not hurry. And something inside me recognizes the lesson.
November is a threshold month, a thin veil between the gold of autumn and the deep dreaming of winter. The river feels like a witness—listening, absorbing, holding the quiet conversations between the seasons. It does not resist the turning of the year; it simply flows, carrying what was, making room for what will be.
The fallen leaves along the banks are not loss—they are surrender. A letting go. Nature shows us, again and again, that shedding is not death but preparation. The river moves onward not in urgency, but in trust.
In the starkness of the season, there is a strange comfort. The landscape, stripped down to bone and branch, offers an uncluttered kind of truth: nothing unnecessary remains. Silence is not emptiness—it is spaciousness. A room large enough for spirit to breathe.
As I sit here, warmed by coffee and music and the small lamp glow of the wee cottage, I realize: this quiet river is a mirror not just of the sky, but of my own inner tide. It invites me to drift inward, to rest in stillness, to stop treating reflection as a luxury and instead honor it as a need.
Dr. Wayne Dyer once said that the key to happiness is not getting what we want, but wanting what we have. Gratitude transforms every inch of life, even the spare land of November.
So I begin this day not with hurry, but with noticing:
the way morning light slowly reveals the world,
the way quiet holds wisdom,
the way breath itself is prayer.
I am thankful—for the river, for memory, for the soft ache of old leaves and new understanding.
And for the simple, ongoing miracle of being here,
alive and aware,
on a still November morning.
“Silence is not the absence of sound, but the presence of everything that cannot be heard.” ~John O’Donohue
~Wylddane
That memory returns now like a leaf blown back across the years.
The music in the room is Diane Upshaw, her voice drifting like incense through the quiet, singing Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs—pure, aching, beautiful. Outside, the light gathers slowly, as if November prefers not to arrive all at once. I look to the photograph before me: a quiet river in the northwoods, still as glass, reflecting the bare trees like a second forest turned upside-down.
The leaves are gone. The branches have become script against a pale November sky. The river does not hurry. And something inside me recognizes the lesson.
November is a threshold month, a thin veil between the gold of autumn and the deep dreaming of winter. The river feels like a witness—listening, absorbing, holding the quiet conversations between the seasons. It does not resist the turning of the year; it simply flows, carrying what was, making room for what will be.
The fallen leaves along the banks are not loss—they are surrender. A letting go. Nature shows us, again and again, that shedding is not death but preparation. The river moves onward not in urgency, but in trust.
In the starkness of the season, there is a strange comfort. The landscape, stripped down to bone and branch, offers an uncluttered kind of truth: nothing unnecessary remains. Silence is not emptiness—it is spaciousness. A room large enough for spirit to breathe.
As I sit here, warmed by coffee and music and the small lamp glow of the wee cottage, I realize: this quiet river is a mirror not just of the sky, but of my own inner tide. It invites me to drift inward, to rest in stillness, to stop treating reflection as a luxury and instead honor it as a need.
Dr. Wayne Dyer once said that the key to happiness is not getting what we want, but wanting what we have. Gratitude transforms every inch of life, even the spare land of November.
So I begin this day not with hurry, but with noticing:
the way morning light slowly reveals the world,
the way quiet holds wisdom,
the way breath itself is prayer.
I am thankful—for the river, for memory, for the soft ache of old leaves and new understanding.
And for the simple, ongoing miracle of being here,
alive and aware,
on a still November morning.
“Silence is not the absence of sound, but the presence of everything that cannot be heard.” ~John O’Donohue
~Wylddane
RSS Feed